How Did Angie Chang Learned to Code (Interview)

Angie Chang is one of the popular tech innovator and a certified programmers who co-founded Women 2.0, an organization committed to increasing the number of women entrepreneurs starting high growth ventures by providing resources, network, and knowledge for the launch and growth of their company. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for Women 2.0 and in January 2008, she began organizing Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners, asking that guys come as the “plus one” for once. Sponsors of the dinners have included Google, Facebook, LOLapps, Polyvore, and Yahoo! Angie holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley. In an interview with Codecademy, Angie Chang, shared her secrets on how she was able to learn to code on her own and made a name for herself as one of the certified programmers in the USA. Here's the interview of Angie Chang as conducted by Codecademy: According to Angie Chang she studied English and Social Welfare in college to focus on easier topics after she barely passed the Computer Science major requirements at UC Berkeley. Angie started in tech after her graduation by building websites under her belt, so her first job was at a venture-backed start-up. During her stay with the firm, she quickly learned how lonely it can be as a woman on an all-male engineering teams, so she went on to start Women 2.0 to meet like-minded entrepreneurial women in tech, and then two years later she started the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners to meet even more of them. According to Angie she is currently working to change the ratio of women in engineering as Director of Growth at Hackbright Academy. An accelerated software development program solely for women, to attract students from all over the world and pair them with software engineers mentors to help them find work in tech. How Did Angie Chang Started Programming Angie Chang revealed that she did get into programming during her high school days when they got AOL at their home and she was fascinated by the Internet. She looked at the HTML behind the simple webpages in 1999, and learned to write her own code and put up webpages. Although she was shy and quiet, she she supported her friends in leadership positions by creating their websites, and they started referring her to paid positions. According to Angie she learn to program through her curiosity about how things work. She always thought how does a website render by peeking behind the curtain and find what lines of code that eventually make sense and after that she does a lot of Googling and asking questions. Google was instrumental for Angie Chang as a great resource for learning to program, as well as simply hanging out with other people who like to code. As an added advice, she stated that in order to get interest in programming we should start asking questions out loud, over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and we will surely learn from answer we receive. Just start iterating on your idea, and it will snowball.